When Worlds Collide, War Need Not Follow

An image from Dawn of Discovery, a strategy game from Ubisoft involving empire-building in the Occident and the Orient.

Only Germans, perhaps, could make a game about economics — a stylish, intelligent and captivating one at that.

Dawn of Discovery is the best new single-player strategy game I have played in several years. It will not satisfy anyone’s inner warlord; if pillaging, bombing and grinding your virtual enemies into submission is your idea of strategic game play, Dawn of Discovery is not for you. But if building a grand, classical empire spanning both the Occident and Orient sounds appealing, Dawn of Discovery, particularly the Windows version, is the kind of game that can easily occupy hundreds of hours over many years.

It is understandable, if vaguely condescending, that Ubisoft, the game’s publisher, has called the game Dawn of Discovery in North America while calling it Anno 1404 in the rest of the world. (The game is set in an approximation of the early 15th century.) After all, the broad American consumer has never been that great at history, especially when it comes to times before our own. Ubisoft is French, but the game’s developer, Related Designs, is German, and Dawn of Discovery is a quintessential German game.

It almost goes without saying that American media products are far more filled with depictions of violence than European ones. Having experienced war and genocide at home quite recently, Europeans are far less enamored than Americans are of turning violence into entertainment.

That contrast is nowhere more clear than in video games. American games are generally the most violent in the world, followed closely by Japanese ones. But Germany is particularly vigilant when it comes to excising the most violent scenes from games sold in that country. Some especially gory games (and many, if not all, of those involving Nazis) cannot be sold in Germany at all.

That shying away from violence does not extend just to video games. In recent years a new wave of nonelectronic German board games has found an eager audience around the world, including in the United States. In many ways Dawn of Discovery is more similar to great German board games like Puerto Rico and Settlers of Catan than it is to most American computer strategy games.

Catan and Puerto Rico are about trading with other players and building up your mini-empire, not about crushing your enemies by force. Dawn of Discovery is different from American real-time strategy computer games like StarCraft and Command & Conquer in the exact same way.

Many American gamers are familiar with empire-building only through turn-based games like Civilization. Dawn of Discovery is a real-time game, so the action unfolds as you play rather than pausing while you queue up orders and moves turn by turn. Yet Dawn of Discovery is different from and more interesting than most real-time games in two ways.

First, the problem with most real-time strategy games is that eventually they simply overwhelm the player with micromanagement. Send some tanks over here, respond to an enemy incursion over there, order 10 more battleships or whatever, all with very little time to respond. Most real-time strategy games devolve into a contest of who can keep the most balls in the air the longest. They can feel cheap.

Dawn of Discovery does a masterly job of allowing players to focus on the big picture of their budding empires while the scut work of moving goods around and managing trade routes can largely take care of itself. The player can dive into the minutiae at any time, but in general if I’m going to take a beating in a strategy game, I want it to be because of a high-level strategic miscalculation, not because I didn’t fine-tune my wheat production to the nth degree.

The other difference that distinguishes Dawn of Discovery is that while combat is the entire foundation of most strategy games, it is almost an afterthought in Dawn of Discovery — a natural, organic, almost ancillary outgrowth of an empire’s growing commercial power and appetite. The game makes it so hypnotically enjoyable to build a settlement from huts to town houses, to build churches and bazaars and spice farms and stone quarries, that it’s easy to forget about the naval skirmishes.

In its intricate and well-drawn story line Dawn of Discovery is anti-colonial. The player begins as a minor noble in what is called an Occidental empire and is soon tasked with establishing relations with and exploring the Orient. The Orient, with its gorgeous Middle Eastern architecture, is basically populated by the good guys. The bad guys are the zealous Crusaders from the Occident who want to exploit the Orient. Ideally the player ends up defeating the bad guys and restoring peace and justice to the Occident.

Dawn of Discovery is also available for Nintendo’s Wii and DS, but this is really a game with its soul on the PC. The story-driven campaign mode is wonderfully paced. Meanwhile entire nights and weekends (not to mention cross-country plane flights) will inevitably be occupied in sandbox mode. For the thinking game player those hours could hardly be better spent.

A version of this review appears in print on , on page C7 of the National edition with the headline: When Worlds Collide, War Need Not Follow. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe